Dr. Eleonora Rohland

Entangled History in the Americas. Environment and Society

About

I am Assistant Professor for Entangled History in the Americas (16th to 19th centuries) and director of the Center for InterAmerican Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. I was trained as an economic, social, and environmental historian at the University of Bern, Switzerland and received my PhD from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. The focus of my recently-published book on hurricanes in New Orleans emerged from the interdisciplinary research context of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities Essen (KWI)'s program "Climate and Culture", which I was a PhD fellow in from 2008 to 2012.

I now specialize in environmental history and specifically in climate impact- and disaster history. My geographical focus has so far been mostly on North America and is now shifting to the Caribbean and deeper into the colonial/ early modern period with my current book project. It is tentatively entitled Encountering the Tropics and Transforming Unfamiliar Environments in the Caribbean, 1494 to 1804, and focuses on what notions of "nature" and agricultural practices Spanish, French, and British settlers brought to Hispaniola/ Saint Domingue and Jamaica; and how both shaped - and at the same time were re-shaped by - the unfamiliar local environment, climate, and indigenous societies. The focus is hence, on the parallel transformation of societies and natural environments and the tight entanglement and mutual permeation of these spheres through existing (indigenous), imported (European and African), and newly developed (creolized) practices in the succeeding centuries up to the Haitian Revolution.

I believe that in order to deal with the complexity of present-day societal and environmental problems it is crucial to understand the complexity of past societies and their relationships with the natural world. History teaches us to look at events from different perspectives, maybe even perspectives that are opposed to our own convictions; it teaches us to accept ambiguity, non-binarity, and contingency as fundamental components of human life through time.

Books

“In her compelling book, Dr. Eleonora Rohland blends history with social science analysis to make a superb contribution to scholarship on hurricanes, environmental history, and American history.”• Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University

“Rohland’s work is a deeply researched and persuasively argued exploration of the essential role of historical scholarship in understanding long-term human adaptation to changing environments. It transcends the boundaries of environmental history and presents powerful insights into current issues related to global change.”• Craig E. Colten, Louisiana State University

Hurricanes have been a constant in the history of New Orleans. Since before its settlement as a French colony in the eighteenth century, the land entwined between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River has been lashed by powerful Gulf storms. Time and again, these hurricanes have wrought immeasurable loss and devastation, spurring reinvention and ingenuity on the part of inhabitants. Changes in the Air offers a rich and thoroughly researched history of how hurricanes have shaped and reshaped New Orleans from the colonial era to the present day, focusing on how its residents have adapted to a uniquely unpredictable and destructive environment across more than three centuries.The book appeared in the Environmental History: International Perspectives Series of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Berghahn Books in 2018. The introduction can be downloaded here and the book orderd from the Berghahn website.

In 1861 the Swiss town of Glarus was destroyed by fire. The conflagration was the direct spur for the creation of Swiss Re, which has now become one of the world's largest re-insurers. Today, the company has left the struggles of its founding years far behind. The book focuses on these 'birth pains' and follows the development of the company up to one of its largest loss cases: the earthquake and fire of San Francisco in 1906. It is rooted in business as well as in environmental history, thus contributing to a field which may be called environmental business history. The book appearedwith Carnegie Publishing/Crucible Books: Lancashire in 2011.

Teaching

I regularly teach courses in Bielefeld University's History MA and its international MA program InterAmerican Studies (IAS), mostly environmental history of the colonial Americas (e.g. focusing on climate, food, energy or resources etc.) but also more general themes, such as the Age of Revolutions or transatlantic and inter-American migration. It is an interdisciplinary MA program that attracts students from all over the world, many of course from the Americas, but also from countries of the Near East and Asia. I also teach courses in Bielefeld's history BA.

I believe that we cannot understand where we are in the present or where we are going in the future, if we do not understand the process of how we got here. In this sense, my approach to my teaching and research aims to connect past processes with questions of the present.